Reaching hiring managers directly: business contact data versus the InMail queue

InMail response rates have been falling for years because every recruiter uses the same channel with the same templates. The medium itself now signals 'mass outreach'. A direct email that references something specific about the recipient's company lands in a different mental category: it reads as professional correspondence, not as spam.

The prerequisite is accuracy. A guessed email address that bounces damages your sender reputation; a wrong name kills the conversation before it starts. That is why the source of your contact data — official registers and verified business directories rather than scraped lists — determines whether this strategy works at all.

For recruitment sales you need four things per target company: the right person (directors and function titles that own hiring), a deliverable email address, a direct or switchboard phone number, and enough company context — sector, size, recent changes — to personalise the first sentence.

Resist the temptation to collect everything. A tight record with the correct decision-maker outperforms a fat profile of the wrong person. Start from the hiring decision, map backwards to who owns it at companies of that size, and pull exactly those contacts.

Use the data to be relevant, not to be everywhere. A proven sequence: one email referencing a concrete company event, one follow-up with a market insight from your niche, one call. Three touches, each adding information. Recruiters who send eight messages are not persistent — they are training the market to ignore them.

Drimble provides company records with the registration details, officer information and business contact fields recruiters build outreach on, across ten markets including the UK, France, Belgium and Ireland. Company data for the Netherlands is not part of our coverage.